Its Over, page-22993

As illustration, if you had invested in RHC 6.5 years ago and held to this present day, a $100k invested would now be worth $69.5k

But if you had instead park that $100k in an asset yielding just 3.5%pa, that $100k would now be worth $125k

That works out to be $55,5k more than sticking with RHC, and just under 80% more (125/69.5).

Yes, in investing there is a Time Opportunity Cost of Money that most investors do not take into account.

If you had invested $100k in IAG 6.5 years ago, you would have $99,859 today in the worth of your IAG stock, so that investor would say Time in Market, he/she recovered all earlier losses and now almost break even.

The reality however is that had he/she invested that $100k in a safe asset class that yielded just 3.5% pa, he/she would have $125k instead, so actually he/she lost $25k not $0.

If you take this Time Opportunity Cost of Money in account, you would want to avoid being stuck in a dead or dropping stock before it got to that stage.

If you had bought APX at its $33 peak in July 2020, but able to make a decisive cut loss in Feb 2021 at $15.86, a very painful -51.94% loss, you would have lost -$52k for a $100k invested. Had you not sold it then and kept till today, it would be worth just $1378, a huge loss of -$98.6k, a difference of $50.6k to cutting loss earlier. But had you re-invested the $48k proceeds from an earlier sale of APX to invest in CBA, you would be able to bring that capital back to $71.9k, losing just -$28k compared to -$98.6k, that is a $70k difference.

And that is just an example of what holding a Dog can take you and how you could switch from a Dog to a Star to recoup your losses.